WENCO is the largest non-food system supplier in Germany and supplies around 10,500 supermarkets and drugstores with everyday items. WENCO attaches great importance to personal customer care: Over 50% of employees work in the field. The need for a business intelligence system arose in 2010: the merger of several individual companies to form WENCO Germany not only almost doubled the number of customers; the rapid growth also resulted in an enormous flow of data that could no longer be controlled with the systems previously used. „We were faced with a veritable data chaos,“ recalls Johanna Gärtner, Managing Director and BI expert at WENCO. „We could only counter this with a new BI system.“ The top priority was to create transparency. The data structure was to be improved and standardized by the new system, and access by different users was to be simplified

and the various company calculations are linked analytically. After scrutinizing several systems, WENCO decided on a data warehouse with Microsoft SQL Server and DeltaMaster as the front-end system. However, it was not only the technology that was changed, the structure and design of the reports were also important to WENCO. What to look out for was worked out in training sessions together with Bissantz. The focus was on the functionality and appearance of the reports. „The layout is particularly important for our customer reports,“ explains Johanna Gärtner. Not only employees in Controlling, but also Sales, Purchasing and IT were trained. „At the beginning, we even handed out small exercises,“ Johanna Gärtner recalls with a wink. „That helped our employees to familiarize themselves with the new system environment.“­